In days gone by, stage comedians might pose a curious query: If bricklayers can lay bricks, how come plumbers can’t lay plums? A century or so later we learn that folks in the English market town of Pershore, Worcestershire, are reviving a 500-year-old lapsed tradition. They have appointed an official plum charmer.
A positively pluvial spring and summer had left many local damsons in distress and with the annual Plum Festival nigh something had to be done.
So fifty-year-old solicitor Paul Johnson became Pershore’s official Plum Charmer. He agreed to don the ceremonial costume of tricorn hat, black gown and wing collar, to meander through plum orchards serenading the trees on his clarinet.
A revival of a charming tradition indeed, but could it actually be effective? The jury is still out on this one. Meanwhile, however, plumbing files on the subject of music affecting plants, it might just work. It seems plants may respond to the sound of music.
Dorothy Retallack of the Colorado Women’s College in Denver researched the subject for her book,
The Sound of Music and Plants. In 1973, she conducted one of the most thorough experiments using separate laboratories to expose identical plants to ‘easy listening’ and rock music. Retallack discovered that while her plants thrived on easy listening, growing and flourishing, those rocking and rolling wilted and died. There was, she recorded, no reaction to country and western. Jazz though appeared enjoyed by her plants, which also seemed to prefer string over percussion while positively doting on sitar.
More recently, in spring last year, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra released a CD to encourage growth in the garden.
Inevitably, vintners were also bound to experiment. In Austria, a group of winemakers claimed their fermenting grape juice produced a better-tasting wine when exposed to a mixture of classical, jazz and electronic tunes. This was done through miniature speaker suspended in the liquid. At last, one scientist remained dubious: Werner Gruber, a University of Vienna physicist, labelled it “rubbish.”
But research by Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society appears to indicate that tomato plants, at least, respond more positively to female as opposed to male voices. In 2009, five men and five women were recorded reading from Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species, Shakespeare’s
Midsummer Night’s Dream, or
The Day of the Triffids. For a month, these recordings were played back to the experimental subjects. The RHS found that the tomato plants that listened to the female voices grew an average of an inch more than the ones that listened to the male voices.
Mi-Jeong Jeong of the National Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology in Suwon, South Korea, and colleagues claimed in 2007 to have identified two genes in rice that respond to sound waves, they reported in the journal
Molecular Breeding. The rice plants were exposed to 14 different classical pieces, including Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata, the researchers reported. It seems rock just will not do.
The Plum Festival at Pershore continues through until the third week of this month. By strange coincidence, the nickname of novelist P. G. Wodehouse, creator of Bertie Worcester, Jeeves and other beloved characters, was – ‘Plum.’
